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Trip.com’s Lynn Qu on going global and building a super travel app

2019/6/16 19:38:15

A year into her role as vice president, product and marketing for Trip.com, and Lynn Qu is taking her experience working for brands such as Microsoft, Expedia and HomeAway (now Vrbo) to take the Ctrip group brand global and using the Chinese edge in native app development to build a super travel app.

The challenge was also hard to resist. “Ctrip is a very powerful company in China, yet it’s a relatively unknown brand worldwide. It has huge ambitions to scale globally and is trying to find its way. There haven’t been many super successful software companies from China that have had an impact on a global scale.

“Trip.com is a nascent brand and it is super exciting to ride on a giant that is as yet unknown outside China.”

On her plate is a list of hundreds of things to do but Qu has set her priorities. “We continue to grow and we’ve had triple digit growth since its founding two years ago. It’s relatively easier to do that on a small base.”

The bigger challenge is how to fully globalize from an organizational point of view, as well as keep that same DNA that Ctrip is known for – customer service.

“We have call centers in places like Edinburgh, Tokyo and Seoul but building a global business takes time – things are different globally. In terms of scale, we have to look at how to achieve global operational efficiency and maturity. So growing the team to handle international business is critical – call it the internationalization of people.”

“In terms of core competence in native app development, no one does it better than the Chinese and our aim is to build a super travel app to make it easy for customers to book their travel in one spot.”

It benefits from Ctrip’s scale in sourcing and tech but “we are very distinct from each other”, said Qu.